This Way Comes
by reathai
Summary: Merlin’s nightmares are about to become real.


**Disclaimer:** Don't sue me.

_Notes: Uh. Yeah. I kind of don't know what this is._

* * *

The man in the heavy jacket stepped away from the box, still talking loudly and gesturing wildly to whoever was still inside. "C'mon then!" he shouted with a little too much excitement, and a blonde girl very slowly stepped from the blue box with an annoyed expression.

How had they fit into such a tiny space? I pressed myself even closer to the tree, so that the bark rubbed against the rough fabric of my shirt. If I came back with patterned burns and scrapes, Gaius would ask one too many questions about what I'd been up to, and I'd be left cleaning his cauldrons again. Joy. As much as I enjoyed sticking my fingers into slime, I also had Arthur to worry about, and all of _his_ metaphorical slime. I hated slime. Sometimes I really hated having such stupid responsibilities when it came to interesting things like this. How many other times in my life would I witness a box materialize in front of me?

Stealing a glance in said box's direction again, I watched silently as the girl chattered angrily at the man, something about being stuck somewhere and that she didn't like these kinds of surprises. _That makes two of us_.

"Doctor, really?" Her hands tugged at the flowing dress she wore, one I could swear I'd seen before on Morgana. And very much like an irritated Morgana, the girl propped fists on her hips and leant back onto her heels expectantly. "I don't see why you can't just _tell_ me-"

"But it's a surprise!" whined the man cheerfully. The girl leveled an unimpressed stare at him, still yanking on the fabric. "Rose, you won't believe-"

"Fine, fine, but I hope you've got another dress in there somewhere, because-"

He beamed a winning smile at her. "Rose, you look brilliant."

Rose slapped at his arm, but hurriedly grasped the crook of it, tugging him in the direction of the castle. "C'mon, you. Let's go see Arthur!"

"You're about to be sorely disappointed," I snorted after them. The pair all but sprinted for the front gates, arm in arm and singing obnoxiously about a wizard and something called Oz; if I wasn't so preoccupied with the strange blue box, I might have warned them about mentioning wizards in Camelot, but as it was, I felt a tremendous distraction eclipsing my attention span. Also, I kind of secretly liked the idea of someone else taking the heat for once. I didn't particularly relish the thought of being roasted alive.

With the satchel forgotten by the base of the tree, I wandered over to the box and very cautiously knocked on the frame. It sounded hollow inside – hollow, and wooden. And blue, with letters and symbols I almost recognised but not enough to read them properly. Gaius would probably know them if he saw them…but I couldn't exactly go back and say, "Gaius! A magical blue box carrying two people suddenly appeared in the forest, and I need you to read what it says on the front!" I'd just get a blank stare for my trouble, then a warning about drinking out of the stream by the mushroom patch.

So, I rapped on what looked like the door. Then I cast a furtive glance over my shoulder, spread my fingers, and commanded it to open. If those people came back, I'd be in a whole new world of trouble, especially after considering their impossible arrival. What kind of magic could make an entire box appear out of nowhere, and with two passengers? I'd heard stories about flying carpets, but a box? That was more than a bit much. Warning bells sounded in the back of my mind, sounding suspiciously like Arthur's Merlin-you-idiot drawl, but I ignored them and stepped inside anyway, because I was, after all, a grade-A idiot… and stepped back out again because nothing I was seeing made any sense at all. How was it _bigger_ on the inside? How could it possibly be bigger on the inside?

"What the hell are you?" I snapped at the box, and the darkened expanse within it. Arches of mangled wood-that-wasn't-wood vaulted overhead, while light glowed softly from the central mass of cables and ropes and glass. It looked like Gaius' workshop, minus all the books and clothes and plates that were usually scattered on every possible surface. This place had a similar deep hum to it as the dragon's former prison, which should've been another warning in itself. But no; another step closer, and the glow abruptly increased by tenfold, enough so that I had to throw a hand in front of my face. Something somewhere groaned quietly, and, unthinkingly, I rested my free palm on one of the levers and felt the steady vibrations of something, felt the way the light seemingly leeched into the exposed skin of my hand. Too captivated to pull away, I let the light wind up my arm, toward my shoulder – and then, I felt it, a bone-jarringly powerful force, and the whispers, the millions of whispers.

"TARDIS," they said. "Doctor. Find him."

I gasped and pulled away as if shocked, the last faint traces of memories that weren't mine still dancing before my eyes. _Merlin, you idiot. Why do you need to touch things? Why? This is how you get yourself into trouble!_ This box had most definitely spoken to me, and worse yet, its presence had felt familiar. This wasn't any magic I knew, or had heard or read of – this was something radically different, and those two people – that Doctor and his friend – were about to get into a horrifying mess if I didn't act fast. I hated acting fast, because I was horrible at it. I was horrible at it, and it was the one thing I had to do on a near-daily basis.

Sighing heavily, I jogged down the metal-grated gangway to the door, pushed it open- and ran right into a very large, very unyielding body, clad in very familiar armor and bearing a very familiar sword.

"Merlin!" Arthur barked in disbelief. "What the hell- What _is_ this thing? Is this yours? Did you build some-"

"What?" Eyes wide and barely able to believe how quickly he'd found my trail, I stumbled backwards into the door. "What? No. No, this isn't mine. I- It's kind of a…I..."

Arthur just stared. Then he sheathed his sword and patted the box roughly, his expression still bearing very obvious bewilderment and incomprehension. "So what is this thing? And," he added somewhat menacingly, "why the hell were you in it?"

"I fell in," I said automatically. He rolled his eyes. "I-I, uh. There were these two people, and they came out of it, and I went to see what it was and I fell in because the door was unlocked-"

"Well, move then, so I can see-"

"NO!" Reaching behind me, I shut my eyes and locked it, but to him it looked like I was hugging the box backwards. If he ever saw the inside, he'd scream, MAGIC, so fast my head would implode, and then I'd be in even more trouble because I found it, and I'd sounded like a lunatic if I ever revealed the exact circumstances revolving around the box's discovery. Disembodied noises weren't exactly considered sane. Also, Uther had it out for me. "No!"

I could hear him breathing heavily in exasperation as he tried to knock me out of the way. "Now, Merlin, don't be ridiculous-"

"That-that's just it, though," I told him as he successfully shoved past me and tried yanking on the handle. "It uh, it locked."

"It locked." Arthur turned to face me, looking spectacularly unimpressed. Then he shrugged, and headed back toward Camelot. "Fine then, I haven't got time to explore a strange box in the middle of the forest. I know you're tired and I know you aren't thinking straight – as if that were anything new – but if you wanted to build something, Merlin, you should have picked a more secluded area."

I waited, arms crossed, until he spun around to investigate exactly why I wasn't following him. "I told you, it isn't mine." He ignored me, but thought better of it and opened his mouth. "It's not mine, but I know whose it is, and I think we should go find them because they're about to enter Camelot with the hopes of seeing you." That didn't sound crazy at all. The nervous energy I'd felt earlier began to creep back into my blood, and while he seemed content to stand there and mock me all day, I had to shut my eyes to the foreign words and memories that demanded I find this Doctor person, whoever he was. The box obviously liked him enough to share certain bits of knowledge with me, and if it weren't for how real everything had felt, and how I somehow felt the deep earnestness of the glowing being inside the box, I'd think that I'd been enchanted. Maybe I was, and didn't know it.

"Merlin," Arthur began patiently, "if your imaginary friends inside your box want to see me, they'll need to-"

"Come off it, you stupid prat," I bit back at him. "We have to find the Doctor." He stared again in that uncomprehending way, in that Merlin-what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about way. "The man, the man who owns this. He's called the Doctor and we have to find him."

"The Doctor," he repeated slowly. "What kind of name is that?"

"How should I know? Now let's go find him." Shouldering past him and ignoring his annoyed grunt, I began jogging back toward town with Arthur hot on my heels. I hated explaining things, because explaining things always got me into trouble, particularly when they involved magic. I kind of hated secrets too. And Uther's intolerance, since if he would just announce, "I'm open-minded about magic. Maybe it isn't all evil," I could finally stop hiding, and/or save the Doctor and Rose from whatever horrible fate the TARDIS-thing feared. My mind kept insisting it was burning at the stake, but I refused to think about that for obvious reasons.

That awful familiarity wouldn't leave me, either. It was almost as if I'd slipped on a pair of gloves that I couldn't remove; a light sheen of _something_ lingered around me, and while I felt calmer than I had in weeks, I also felt enormously anxious. If I didn't find the Doctor, something horrible would happen. Something more horrible than cross words from Gaius and a temper tantrum from Arthur over his unpolished armor, like the one he was currently spewing at me. I ignored him completely. That something horrible had solidified into a dark weight at the back of my mind, threatening to drag me down into the same terrible abyss I recognised from every nightmare I'd experienced over the past few weeks. Something was coming.


End file.
